


End of an Era

by nerdyydragon



Series: Kingsman Tumblr Ficlets [25]
Category: Kingsman (2014), Kingsman (Movies), Kingsman 92015)
Genre: Gen, Harry Hart is Dead, Heavy Angst, Pre-Slash, letters and journal entries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:57:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8362060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdyydragon/pseuds/nerdyydragon
Summary: If Eggsy had one wish, it would be that things didn't have to end. He knew that sometimes it was for the better, but knowing that didn't make it hurt any less.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing, except the tears I spilt on my laptop while I wrote this.

Eggsy hated endings, and it seemed like it was because of this that everything good that had ever happened to him came to an end. His father died before he ever really had a chance to know him; he had to quit the marines and with it his hopes of getting out of the estates; Harry.

Harry had by far been the hardest. He had seen plenty of people do horrible things, so it wasn’t the violence that the man had committed nor was it the abruptness of his death. If he were honest, he would say that he admired the beauty of the horrors Harry had wrought, thought it poetic, in a sick sort of way. He thought it fitting, the neatness of his own death, quick, no chance to regret.

But it had been an end all the same.

Eggsy had ploughed on through, driven by what Harry had done, what Harry had given him, gripped the opportunity he had been presented with tightly with both his hands and never intended to let go, even if it killed him. Maybe it would. It didn’t matter, not in the end. Because he had reconciled himself to being nothing more than a footnote of history, his own tale never mentioned or sought. So he worked; he worked and he slept, and in between he tried to make a shot at living, instead of just surviving. It was the least he could do, after all, to honour the memory of a man who had willingly met his own end while offering him a beginning.

Eggsy sat in a small café, fog still burning off the early morning hours, when there were few people about to disturb him. He sat with his tea and a worn, leather bound journal that he had dug out of a drawer in Harry’s office. He had thumbed through it once (perhaps twice) and all he had left to read were the last two entries, which he had been almost religiously avoiding. Eggsy wasn’t quite sure why, the author for all intents and purposes was cold in the ground near fourteen months and could offer him no reproach or condescension for his doing so. Perhaps it was because he was unsure of what he’d find. Harry was a private person, even in the recesses of his own self, and he thought there no hope of his own mention, no opportunity for a reference to his trials.

He was wrong.

The second to last entry was dated two months into his candidacy, and was written in a decidedly different tone than the rest of the book.

_ I seem to have been… lost to myself. In writing this I hope to reconcile the two pieces of me into which I seem to have split. In truth, I have never felt this way; at war with the duty to my work and to my country, and to a sensibility unlike any I thought myself truly capable. To understand the full effect - more for my own benefit than for anyone else’s, heaven forbid - I must mention that my first real meeting with this person occasioned what feels to be a lifetime ago; perhaps it was. I thought nothing of them then, no more than gentle pity for their situation. But upon our second meeting…. _

Harry trailed off here, and began to speak of other things as though distracting himself from the truth he had intended to relay. Eggsy knew that he must be the person that Harry had been speaking of, but the rest of the entry written in the same firm, elegant script bore no mention of the continuation. He talked of the inevitably of endings and Eggsy suffered through it no matter how much it pained him to do so, to hear a man he had cared so deeply for talk at length of the discontinuation of persons and the world around them. Aside from a brief mention and a grievance of Merlin, Harry made no mention of his work - not in the traditional sense, at least. To the public Harry had been a writer, never published but never needing to be. Eggsy had found his manuscripts, and thanks to his adept editing skills that had been honed in his time at Kingsman he had found them without fault either in content or grammar. He had half a mind to publish them, for no other reason than to have to world know Harry for who he truly was; the great man the world had lost in the wake of the terrible events of V-Day.

Sitting back to collect himself and wipe at the tears that had threatened to damp the inked pages, Eggsy turned to the final entry. Harry had never started an entry on the same page in which he had finished the previous, and though he enjoyed the symbolism it made reading a pain. The next entry was dated significantly later - just six days before the man’s death, and on it was a short paragraph that ran in places with the effect of teardrops.

_ I know that in this line of work mortality is a constant and deceptive mistress, and to have been blessed with the life I have lived is a miracle unto itself. My greatest triumph has been, without a doubt, the establishment of Eggsy Unwin, yet he is also my greatest regret. In hope I have kept him close, in fear I have lied - for my intentions post-submission have not been entirely honest. As I write this I know in my heart that I will meet my maker soon, and if I am to go it is with this: that I never let it be known how deeply I loved him. _

The remainder of the book, over fifty pages, were blank. Setting the worn journal closed and off to the side, Eggsy buried his head in his arms and cried unashamedly.

He mourned endings, and he cursed Death and Fate and a thousand other deities that were no longer in his favour and had never favoured him, and he pitied himself for his own selfishness.

But above all, he mourned a story that never received an ending, for it had never begun.


End file.
